Holograms

TV GHOST, HEAVEN

Holograms

A year plus on after the release of their debut LP, Sweden’s Holograms have returned with their second full length, Forever. After a year and a half of touring, losing their jobs, parts of their sanity and returning home only with the hope that their hard work will eventually pay off, they embarked on a new record drawing from the experiences that had simultaneously excited and exhausted the members.

Frontmen Andreas Lagerström (vocals/bass) and Anton Strandberg (drums) still live in working class Farsta, 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of urbane and metropolitan Stockholm while the brothers’ Spetze (Anton: vocals/guitar, Filip: synth) still live at home. This isolation and boredom after their first international tours led the group to further mature and grow their sound into a record far more cohesive and “big-sounding” than their debut. The band aimed to capture the feeling of music being played in a church or temple, “like a mass…procession, or eulogy” as clearly demonstrated on closing track “Lay Us Down.” Though matured and experienced, the band’s youthful energy and DiY/Punk upbringing is still upfront and in full effect with the caustic “A Sacred State,” the melodic attack of “Rush,” or the unbridled mass-of-energy-cut-loose of “A Blaze on the Hillside.” Clearly, Holograms show no signs of slowing down the excitement and aggression of their original sound, something to delight their growing audience in this current world of arrogant sonic about-faces on sophomore albums.

Forever is more than the next set of songs from Holograms. It’s a fully realized album that fans will relish for years to come. Songwriting and anthemic choruses as classic as the William Bouguereau painting they chose as the basis of their cover, though presented in a new and exciting way. A way perhaps best described with Holograms’ own words for the essence of their music “..energy, honesty, heart and spirit.”

TV GHOST

With every passing year TV Ghost pushes even further down their unparalleled tunnel of multidimensional broadcast interceptions. They have incorporated churning rhythms and psychedelic drone into a lush torrent of gaseous keys, sprawling guitars and eerie melody – echoing some Can kraut and Bad Seeds swagger, while infectiously stirring together a grinding, goth sludge of Heaven Up Here-era Bunnymen and The Cure’s Pornography.

Tim Gick was just returning from the alley back into the scene of the aborted show that had shamed him out of the record store. The guitar and bass so recently abandoned, had been taken up by Jackson VanHorn and Brahne Hoeft respectively. It was early in the year 2005. The three spent the next year or so together with Jimmy Frezza in stoned tragedy, hammering away obscurely, trying to divine signs in the wake of small town existence. But nothing would stabilize. Stark times for an isolated teenager with no prospect for the future. In late 2006, with a shared malaise for the cultural waste that had born them up, TV Ghost was formed.

After six years of extensive touring Tim Gick, Brahne Hoeft, Jimmy Frezza, Tristan Ivas and Jackson VanHorn bring us Disconnect. With the cybernetic squalor of Cold Fish and the churning sea-saw of Mass Dream, still lingering in strands overhead, TV Ghost have found a new maturity in their third full-length for In The Red Records. Disconnect is a journey to the depths of the dream and its awakening.

HEAVEN

HEAVEN was founded by Jacob Cooper, former drummer of Wavves and The Mae Shi. HEAVEN is essentially a solo project, while there have been other people contributing to the band either on tour or in the studio since its conception.